Sal Khan on the importance of free, high-quality AI tools for teachers & district leaders

Hello everyone! Good afternoon. We are slowly welcoming folks into the room. Thanks for taking the time to join us. My name is Philipe Esamia. I'm the video manager here at KH Academy. Uh, shortly we will be joined by S on, the CEO and founder of KH Academy. He will tell you a little bit about our mission, uh, our AI tool and teacher assistant and student tutor called Con Migo. We also have two senior product managers that'll be joining us: Gintas Bras and Sarah Sarah Robertson.

I'm going to go ahead and introduce, uh, Sarah and Gintas now, tell you a little bit about their roles, uh, and what they do here at KH Academy, and some of the things— a little preview of what they'll be presenting today.

Hi Sarah, hi Gintas!

Hey Philipe, welcome everybody! I'm Sarah Robertson, as Philipe mentioned. I am a senior product manager here at KH Academy. I am a former English teacher many years ago. Um, I also previously worked for CommonLit, another edtech nonprofit company, and I've been at Khan Academy now for a little over a year. Mostly, I've been focusing on our literacy-related initiative, so building out content and tools and resources for ELA and Humanities teachers.

Um, the most exciting thing that we've been working on lately is our writing coach tool, which I will show you, um, in detail in a little bit. I'll let Gintas share about himself now.

Sure, thanks Sarah! Hi everyone, my name is Gintas. I'm a senior product manager on our teacher experience team. Um, and like Sarah, I was a teacher in a past life, so I was a middle school English teacher, taught sixth and seventh grade ELA. Um, and then got pulled into the world of product. My team, as the name suggests, is focused primarily on everything and anything we can do to make the lives of teachers easier and to make it possible for teachers to, of course, help their students reach their learning goals and their needs.

So, it's a fun team to be on. It's got a lot of other former educators on it, um, also a lot of English teachers. We do go down the rabbit hole sometimes with our metaphors, so yeah, I'm really excited to show you today about our Kigo tools, um, and what we've been working on to make Kigo the ideal teacher's assistant.

I just wanted to thank everyone for joining. I'll just give a little bit of background and then hand it over to the KH Academy team to go much deeper into things. But I'm assuming most folks here are somewhat familiar with KH Academy's nonprofit mission: free world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

Probably a lot of y'all know how Khan Academy got started, and I used to talk about the origin story just as a fun quirky way that I got involved in KH Academy, but I now talk about it because I think it's very relevant to some of what we're going to talk about with AI and beyond.

You know, back in the day, I started tutoring cousins; word spreads in my family. Free tutoring is going on. Before I know it, I'm tutoring many cousins. I start trying to scale those types of personalized one-on-one interactions. I start making writing exercises for them—teacher tools. I was the first user of the teacher tools so that I could keep track of what students were doing and make assignments to my cousins. A friend suggested I make videos. Once again, that was a way to scale some of these mini-lessons that I was giving for my cousins.

You fast forward to now, or a couple of years ago. KH Academy is obviously now much more than than me. But as a not-for-profit, everything we've been doing, even though we're now at 160 million plus users, is that same idea: how do we really try to scale the type of attention, personalization, mastery learning, which is just that if students haven't learned something yet, they should get more of an opportunity and incentive to learn it. Uh, how do we scale that to more and more students, and how do we support teachers and educators and school leaders and superintendents in order to better support their students in all of those things?

So, you know, those are the teacher tools and the professional development that we've run over the years. You fast forward to about a year and a half ago, and this is when OpenAI first reached out to us. Uh, we were curious but skeptical. Uh, we’d been monitoring what's been going on in the AI world for a while. It didn't seem ready for prime time, at least in 2022. But then when we saw what GPT-4 could do—and just to give a little bit of clarification on some of the terminology, a lot of people know ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an application that they later created originally on an older model. Now you could access it on GPT-4 if you pay money. But the models are the GPT-3, GPT-4, Google has models like Gemini, etc. Then you have the applications.

But when we saw what GPT-4 was capable of, even though it had its rough spots, we said, "Wow! This could get us that much further to being able to scale the type of personalization that we want to do for students, and it could be that much more powerful for supporting teachers." All of these tasks that teachers need to do—clearly they have to get reporting on how their students are doing—but they're also doing things like lesson plans, exit tickets, progress reports, etc., etc. Maybe it could be a tutor for every student and a teaching assistant for every teacher.

So that's the journey we started to go on. There were obviously a lot of questions about how you handle safety, privacy, um, cheating, and we're working on all of those and we think we have good answers. Uh, but what we're going to show you is especially many of the tools that are teacher-facing that we're very excited about, and we've recently done a pretty significant revamp. We've made it far more accessible to a lot more educators, but also recognize that this is a journey that we're hoping that many of you all want to go on with us—that it can be immediately useful to you right now.

Uh, but as y'all use it and we learn from how you're using it, we can make it better and better so that we can support you and we can support your students. So with that, I'll pass it to the team so they can show you a little bit of what we've been up to.

Alright, thanks! I will get us started with our teacher tools. So, this is our new Kigo teacher tools page. Um, as I mentioned in the introduction, I am a former middle school English teacher, and my team's charge is quite simply to make the lives of teachers easier. When we all think back to our teaching days, um, I still say it's the hardest job that I ever did— um, that any of us ever did. The only way a teacher often can make it through their teaching experience is by leaning on others, by leaning on their support network.

So, in my case, it was a lot of other first-, second-, and third-year teachers. It was a veteran teacher across the hall, uh, Mrs. Hall, who I could see into her classroom and brainstorm ideas for the lesson the next day. And so, in building out Kigo, we want to add another piece to that support network.

So, in the same way you would go across the hall to ask a teacher for ideas, you can now go to Kigo and work with Kigo to make your lessons better, to come up with ideas on how to make sure you're engaging your students.

So to show you what this might look like, I can go in here and say, "I have a lesson tomorrow that I'm teaching, and I'm already dreading it because it is what I know is a topic that my students don’t necessarily love all that much." In this case, let's say it's adding fractions. Um, it's a topic that my students might not find all that engaging. But we are in Baltimore, um, and Baltimore for once has a really good baseball team. So I'm going to say, "Can you make it relevant to my students who might care more about baseball than adding fractions?"

So this would be the same idea of going across the hallway and being like, "Hey, what did you do with your class yesterday that was so cool? Why were they so engaged? Why were they so into your lesson?" And here we can see a couple of ideas on using baseball card statistics, averages, to teach fractions. And this is great! But, of course, I'm a little bit biased. I'm a baseball fan myself, and that might not apply to all my students.

And so this is where it really gets exciting using Kigo, where Kigo is really your partner here and can work with you to customize the content to fit the needs of students. So, looking at this, I can ask Kigo to make changes to this, try something different. In this case, I'm going to say, "Make changes to this," and I know that in my class I have a couple of Taylor Swift fans, so I'm Gonna say, "Make this about Taylor Swift instead."

And I have no idea how this is going to work because I have no idea how you connect Taylor Swift to fractions—but Kigo will give me some ideas here, possibly tying it to track lengths, collaborations to her sales. Um, there was a previous case where Kigo gave me an example of finding fractions in the lyrics of Taylor Swift. These are ideas I would have never come up with or never had um, if I wasn't, you know, brainstorming with Kigo.

So first and foremost, Kigo is a great thought partner. It's also a great lesson plan partner. If I go here and I select lesson plan, I can say, you know, adding fractions, and it will pull from our content here on KH Academy. And so I'll see adding and subtracting negative fractions, create lesson plan, and it will create a full five-part lesson plan that includes differentiation.

And this is where our prompt engineering team, a lot of former educators on that team, have worked to design an experience where Kigo is providing the strategies that your teacher would suggest to another teacher to include in their classrooms. Last but certainly not least, Kigo can also do things like recommend assignments. So if I'm the day before class just thinking about what I should be working with my students on—they might have been working on a couple of topics but I'm not really sure what's next.

I always had questions about scope and sequence and what makes sense to teach after what. Um, I can just ask Kigo in this case, and Kigo will give me a couple ideas as to what to work with my students on tomorrow and say, "Assigned to group one," and I can assign it directly from Kigo, and that will be in my students' accounts the next day for them to be working on. So, really, really excited about where Kigo has gone in terms of the teacher use case—really useful already today.

We as a team have whiteboards upon whiteboards of future tools and ideas on where to take Kigo next, so stay tuned for that. But, um, that's my update for today, and I will pass it over to Sarah to share a little bit more about writing coach.

Thanks, Gintas! Alright, so I think most of you know Khan Academy is very well known for its, um, its STEM content—its excellent videos and articles and exercises and mastery learning. We are really excited about some of the advancements that we're seeing when it comes to AI and ELA and Humanities, and we've been working really hard in the past years at applying some of this innovation and this opportunity to the ELA and Humanities teacher use cases.

So what I'm going to share is a project that we're calling writing coach. This is something that is not available quite yet. We are launching it for this back-to-school season. Right now, there is a feature that is kind of a preview of writing coach that you can see if you have Kigo access, um, for students. That's called our academic essay feedback activity, but I'm going to give you a preview of what writing coach will look like this back-to-school season in a moment.

But really quick, if you—and I think many of you are probably familiar with this quandary of writing instruction in schools right now—research tells us that students need to be spending 60 minutes a day writing in classrooms. Middle and high school students—fewer than 10% of students are actually reaching that goal.

Um, we also know that in order to improve in writing instruction, students need specific, actionable feedback on their writing that is delivered as timely in as timely a manner as possible. This is almost never what happens in reality, and as a result, teachers don't assign quite enough writing. They get super burnt out if they even try to provide personalized feedback on every essay.

So, it's kind of no wonder that students are behind in their writing skills. Um, as I mentioned earlier, I'm a former English teacher—assigning one essay to my students would take 17 hours for me to provide personalized feedback on all their essays. So, um, what I think is particularly exciting about writing coach is first of all the features that it provides for students.

So, one thing that we know is obviously students need feedback in order to become better writers, but many of the teachers that we've spoken to have told us, you know, it's great that your current feedback tool gives feedback on essays, but I can't even get most of my students to the point where they have a first draft. That whole getting started, PE outlining—it's like pulling teeth. It is really hard to even get students to produce something to begin with.

And I also, like that was my experience as well. I remember that moment of looking around and students just feeling so stuck. So, with the writing coach tool, it actually supports students through the entire writing process. From the very beginning, the very first step that writing coach does is it talks to the student. Kigo will talk to the student about the essay prompt. It will make sure that they understand what the expectations are and that if there are any words that they're unfamiliar with, Kigo will help them understand.

You know, what is a rebuttal? Um, how do I write a counterargument? Those kinds of things. So this preview right here shows that initial prompt review stage before the student even begins writing, where they have a casual and, um, kind of low-pressure conversation with Kigo to get them thinking about the essay assignment.

And then, of course, one of the next steps is outlining. So one of the benefits of having Kigo support students through the outlining process is Kigo knows what the teacher's assignment was. So Kigo knows how many paragraphs the teacher expects, what kind of citations the teacher wants to see, you know, what sort of details they want students to include. And when the student is working on their outline, Kigo can make sure that they're on track, and if the student has questions, Kigo knows how to respond.

And if you have students who are completely lost when it comes to writing a thesis, Kigo has been trained to support students through writing and drafting these different elements of an outline without actually doing any of that work for them. When it comes to drafting, obviously Kigo now has the students' outline that it worked on with the student, so it can help the student kind of plug that into their draft and flesh it out more.

Um, and of course, like with all other features, it will not do the writing for the student, but it's there if they get stuck and need a little bit of help. There's also other things happening behind the scenes as the student is drafting that the student can't always see that you will see in a moment on the teacher end.

And for revising, the student can submit their draft to Kigo for feedback. Kigo generates suggestions in five main feedback areas that are aligned to most major rubrics. Students can ask Kigo about the feedback that they got, but most excitingly, they can also revise their essay on the page and get follow-up feedback from Kigo in real time. So they can find out immediately, "Did my suggestion address the suggestion that you gave me?"

And for teachers, I think this is where writing coach, um, where the magic really starts to show. Um, so because students are interacting with Kigo through the whole writing process, we are then able to synthesize that and report it back to the teacher and give them really helpful insights into what students were able to do and where they struggled.

So, some of the things that teachers will be able to see include, you know, of course, where in the assignment every student is—so and so is working on their outline, this person's already in revising—they can see how much time was spent drafting versus revising, or outlining versus drafting. They can see current word count. They can see high-level data about the feedback distribution.

So you know most students got feedback related to evidence. Um, maybe that's something that you should focus on for instruction later. And then these potential originality concerns or these flags—so these are the things that I mentioned. When a student is drafting or even outlining or revising, if they're pasting a large amount of text into the experience, and Kigo doesn't know where it came from, it didn't come from the outline or it didn't come from that conversation, we will raise a flag for the teacher that they can then go in and investigate and see exactly what was pasted, see what happened, kind of dig into that.

Which, from the conversations I've had with teachers having to do this, you know, using Google Docs or, you know, Draftback Chrome extensions one student at a time can be unbelievably time-consuming in itself. And with ChatGPT, I think this is a big, as big of a problem as teachers have ever seen.

So we are really excited about the student benefits of writing coach, but then also a lot of these teacher features that will come with that. Before we go to S for questions, because I'm sure you have a lot of stuff for him, I just want to let you know that, uh, I head up our partnership team here at KH Academy working with schools, school districts and now even states on some level, uh, to partner for our KH Academy District's offering as well as Kigo.

So, uh, a lot of our content and tools are free and totally accessible for your students and teachers to use. Just about every district in the country has their teachers using the free version of KH Academy because it's a fantastic supplemental resource.

Um, if you want additional letters of support and you want your students to have access to Kigo, you can partner with my team, uh, which is the KH Academy District's partnership team, to allow you to basically get support for Khan Academy courses and content, but also, uh, let your students and teachers access Con Migo.

Um, student access for Kigo is only available as part of our, um, district partnerships. Um, and so the way it works is you're basically going to get rostering services, you're going to get data analytics, and you're going to get professional learning both for the core Khan Academy offering but also for Kigo.

Uh, and the professional learning is really key because obviously this AI is new to all of us, so we want to make sure this is a journey we're going through together. So we have really robust professional learning resources, uh, for you as part of our district partnership.

Um, our partnerships start as small as 250 students. So if you're a smaller district or maybe you're a larger district and just wanted to dip your toe in the water, we can partner for as few as 250 student licenses up through as many as you would like.

Um, we only charge for the student licenses, so if you're partnering with us at the district offering, uh, and paying for the student licenses, the teacher licenses are going to be free—which is great! Um, and again, like we talked about, there's the implementation support, um, where we're going to hold your hand and walk you through kind of best practices, how to leverage Khan Academy, how to leverage Kigo, um, train your teachers, train your staff, train your admin, so that everybody's on board for how, uh, the platform should be used.

Um, I will say that professional learning with Kigo is mandatory because this is so new and everybody's learning as we go. We insist that you have some sort of PL as part of the partnership with us. Um, and the PL is going to depend on the scope of the partnership for the smaller partnerships. That might be on-demand PD that your teachers can do async, up through live virtual hours and even recommended in-person PL days that we can come out to your district and train your staff depending on the PL calendar.

But the idea here is we want to support everyone, support all your teachers, and kind of best practices with AI Kigo, um, so that your students and teachers are getting the most out of the platform.

Um, and if you're interested, um, two things you can do here: you can email us directly at district@khanacademy.org or there's a QR code here which will take you to our District's landing page which has a bunch of information about our district offering, Kigo, etc.

So we're on standby now. My team's ready to help, but whether you just want a more detailed demo, we're happy to provide that or more detailed information on pricing, happy to provide that with either one of these touch points. But looking forward to speaking with you.

Uh, if you have any questions, and now I’d love to throw it back to S. We have as much time as possible with him to answer your questions.

Thanks, Jason! So yes, I and others here—not just me—uh, happy to answer any questions and any ideas that y'all might have. We do have a couple questions that are in right now.

Um, does the writing coach have the capabilities to create text-based writing prompts where excerpts are inserted for students to read and analyze? Do you want to go a little bit more in depth with that?

One thing I'll say is that we specifically do support literary analysis essays. Um, you know, structurally, I think Kigo does a very good job at helping students with that if the essay is about anything that is well-known that was published prior to 2023, which is when GPT-4's knowledge base goes up to.

Um, then students actually get support from Kigo analyzing the text. So if the student is like, "I really don't understand this theme or this character or, you know, something that happened in the story," Kigo is aware of that text and can support them with that.

So, um, you can't actually upload your own text yet, although I think we will be able to support something like that fairly soon. But it can help students if the texts are fairly well known. And then also, there's a question: do we have a DSA?

We—we have versions of that with multiple districts. Um, most of the data sharing agreements that I'm familiar with are the ones where we have partnered with the school district and we want to understand the efficacy results better. So we have several districts there, and so that way we can help analyze whether we are hopefully moving the dial the way that many of our efficacy studies indicate that they would.

But, uh, yeah, we—we obviously, you know, we have—I think we're the leaders when it comes to data privacy and solid use of data—only using it to personalize experience, measure efficacy, um, etc. Uh, but, uh, yes, simple answer.

Yeah, Don, you can email the districts@khanacademy.org email address. We’ll sort out with you. We have state-level agreements, we have consortium agreements, uh, DSAs and DPAs—we provide directly to districts as well, so we can definitely sort you out.

But, S, maybe it's useful to talk about what we share or don't share with open in terms of that learning and usage on the platform in terms of the data sharing and student usage.

Sure! I'll yeah, I'll speak a little bit generally about data. When obviously there's a lot of opportunity with artificial intelligence, but there are some fears here. Um, there's a cheating fear, there's a fear of students doing shady things with the AI, and then there's fears of do these conversations somehow get incorporated into the training data for future models, and so could that somehow create a data privacy risk, um, especially with something very sensitive like student data?

So I'll go in that order. Uh, it's already been alluded to; for students, Khan Academy does not support—it will not just answer the question. It really acts as an ethical tutor. Uh, we showed you a little bit of this. There's a TED Talk I gave last year that goes into a lot more depth on that.

But we're very clear now for teachers: they have a teacher mode, and they can—if they put it on student mode, they see what students would see. If they put it in teacher mode, it actually not only supports teachers with answers; it acts like a super teacher's guide. It can help them with all the things that Gintas was showing—lesson plans, lesson hooks, etc., etc.

Uh, another area, a guardrail that we have is when students interact with Kigo, those interactions are all observable by teachers. And then we also have a moderation API or moderation AI, so if the student has a conversation—you know, they're saying they want to, heaven forbid, build a bomb or they want to harm themselves or it's going to shut down those conversations and actively notify, uh, teachers and administrators.

Now the data—and this is a principle for Khan Academy well before general AI—is that we only use data, and this is one of the reasons we're not-for-profit, so we're not even tempted to try to monetize data in some shady way. We only use data to measure our impact, personalize the experience, improve the experience, or inform, um, key trusted stakeholders like teachers or districts. Those are only uses for data.

So when it comes into the AI realm—as I just mentioned—we are storing the student conversations. We’re only using that for teacher reporting or our own evaluation of what is happening and how we can make it better. We do not allow those conversations—and these are agreements that we have with the underlying AI companies—that data cannot be used for the general purpose training of future models.

So none of students' private information can make its way into, let's call it, the public realm. We might use that information to fine-tune or train our own versions to once again personalize or be more effective for students, but once again, that will stay within this garden of Khan Academy, not for the broader world.

So we take that very, very seriously. And, you know, to be clear, there's a ton of people—if we were a for-profit company, every day I have some AI company offering to pay us for that data, and we are saying no. Uh, so you could imagine what might be happening if our governance was a little bit different.

Yeah, and S brings up a great point. As you all are looking at AI products—whether it’s Kigo or the other companies out there—I would really encourage you to actually read privacy policies. There are these companies popping up every day; there are tons of startups out there. We don't know who's behind them. We don't know if there are educational folks looking at the pedagogy and learning of this.

Um, there's a bunch of folks out there right now whose names you will know. Go read their privacy policies, and they specifically say we will not share or sell student data unless we get acquired or go out of business—which is going to be 95% of these companies, right? And so what are they going to do when they start running out of money or they do—they're acquired? Do they have those same guardrails that a company like Khan Academy does in terms of sharing?

So be very careful as you're looking at products in the space right now regarding what they are doing in terms of data sharing, data privacy, data governance. Um, because I think it’s really key decision-making a choice for you all.

Thank you all for joining us today and watching this video and being a part of the Khan Academy learner and teacher community. If you'd like to see more about how Con Migo is supercharging learning in classrooms right now, click on the links on your screen, and to stay in touch and never miss an announcement about free world-class education for anyone, anywhere, be sure to subscribe.